Is there room for critics in a Market Society?, Part II

Samuel L. Jackson comes after A.O. Scott.

When Samuel L. Jackson "hit back" at New York Times critic A.O. Scott over his review of The Avengers, Jackson only typed 105 characters into his Twitter feed (he had 35 to spare). But he still sculpted an argument molded to the culture almost as closely as an ear bud is to its - well, ear.

 #Avengers fans,NY Times critic AO Scott needs a new job! Let's help him find one! One he can ACTUALLY do! Jackson tweeted on May 3. And as his fingers stroked the keys of his iPad, they also touched, consciously or unconsciously, on a number of unspoken millennial assumptions and attitudes.

First - note Jackson doesn't actually say Scott was wrong about The Avengers  - about which Scott had sighed, "While The Avengers is hardly worth raging about, its failures are significant and dispiriting."  (He went on to say: "The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre.")

No, Jackson let Scott's assessment stand, in its way.  And indeed, he has never actually said that he thinks The Avengers is a great movie (I'd be surprised if he did).  No, Jackson instead said that A.O. Scott wasn't doing his job - or, to be precise, that he cannot do his job.

But what is that job, you well may ask?

Now perhaps this is a trivial point.  But sometimes subtle details tell you everything you need to know about the subtext of a debate, and I find it intriguing that Jackson didn't bother to counter Scott's claims, or hint at any kind of argument at all, really, regarding The Avengers.  He seems to assume that the actual quality of the movie is beside the point, as it has proved so popular.  Thus he simply contacts the virtual hordes of its fans, and lets them know that someone in a galaxy far, far away, where alien life forms still read newsprint, has not done his duty toward them.

In other words, Jackson constructs the role of the critic in terms of his or her relationship to a particular movie's audience.  Not even its potential audience, but merely the fanboys who have already lined up to see it; and of course (needless to say!) not to the larger culture, much less any longer view of the cinema.  No, in Jackson's view (and that of many people today), the critic is there to predict and reflect the majority opinion of the audience niche (large or small as it may be) to which a movie has been marketed.

But then other "stakeholders" in the arts have gone even further.   I read the following post, directed to young playwrights, recently on the Emerson College site HowlRound, posted by a body that styles itself "The New York Times Critic Watch Research Team":

Would you ever go out of your way to read [a review] that wasn’t kind in order to “learn something” or “make yourself a better writer” or “give yourself a reason to drink heavily?” No. 

All this begs the question of whether reviews should ever include dramaturgical thoughts like: “the second act needed to be shortened” or “the subplot with the incest didn’t work.” Is this a specific request to the writer or director? Is this so that the audience will go into the show preparing to dread the second act? We know that a review is not studied dramaturgy but rather personal opinion. (If it was dramaturgy the note-giver would see the show more than once, read the script, ask the writer why the second act was written that way before proclaiming a solution to something the writer/director does not think is a problem).

We think this practice, when it happens, is weird.

Now these sentiments may be partly tongue-in-cheek, but let's be honest: they're largely not.  And let's also recall that Samuel L. Jackson didn't actually say out loud that "critics should not practice criticism."  (He implied it, but dodged stating it bluntly.)  The playwrights of HowlRound have less compunction, however.  They find the very essence of criticism "weird," and they want nothing of it.  They won't read their reviews, so don't bother, Mr. Critic, to point out that their second acts don't work!  They'll never know - and anyway, even if their second acts do suck, people should still pay money to suffer through them.  And then write congratulatory notes on Facebook, too!  Because otherwise their feelings will be hurt!

Okay, okay, I know - what do you expect from a crowd of undergraduate playwrights?

Would you sell your critical soul for a Benjamin?  (You probably already have.)

But consider one final piece of evidence in this ongoing debate - the recent offer by the British company Strut & Fret to potential reviewers of their coming visit to Brooklyn: they'll pay $100 for an online review they can reprint as ad copy.  The pitch goes like this:

To qualify, you must (1) have a website (which may be a print medium's online site) on which you exclusively or regularly post theatre reviews; (2) post a review of The Tie That Binds currently in its final week at the Gallery Players Black Box Festival; (3) notify the producers by email at ttbfestival@gmail.com with a link to your review at the time of publication; and (4) agree to permit the producers, should they request to do so, to reprint, publish, and post your review -- or an excerpt of approximately 450 words approved by you -- online with proper credit to you as author, all other rights reserved to you. All reviews must identify playwright Rebecca Sue Haber, director Heather Arnson, and producers David Watson and Strut & Fret, Inc. Reviews posted before 9:00 a.m. EDT Saturday, June 16 will be eligible for a $100 reprint fee if selected for reprint. Reviews posted after that time but on or before Saturday, June 30 will be eligible for a $65 fee if selected for reprint.

Some bloggers have tried to simulate shock at this proposal - but for the life of me I can't figure out why; doesn't it merely openly formalize the relationship that Samuel L. Jackson and HowlRound have suggested?  Yes, I'm afraid it does: it simply identifies economically the critic as a cog in the arts marketing sector of our over-arching market society (as all these parties agree he or she should be).  And what's more - aren't Strut & Fret merely accurately diagnosing the current state of affairs, anyhow?   Critics already behave as if they're being paid by producers - when they don't, they usually face severe blowback from their editors - or colleagues (even major theatres like the Huntington - and of course the A.R.T. - have mounted coordinated email and comment attacks on critics who have harshed on their shows). Indeed, at this point I can't think of many Boston critics who couldn't take up Strut & Fret's offer with a clear conscience.  (Certainly Don Aucoin could send along all his copy without changing a line.)

But would they be in the right to do so?  Let's indulge in a little thought experiment for a moment, and ask ourselves, "Who should a critic work for?  And what precisely should be his job?"

Let's do it in another post, though.  I know I promised I'd keep this discussion to two installments, but sorry, you're going to have to read a third.  To be continued!

Is there room for critics in a Market Society? (Part I)

Anton Ego, the morbidly epicene critic of Pixar's Ratatouille.

Since the seeming triumph of capitalism with the fall of the Berlin Wall, our modes of cultural discourse have, almost unconsciously, bowed more and more to the authority of the market.  Not that the collapse of that particular barricade was proof positive of any such historic consummation (whatever Francis Fukuyama - or Pink Floyd! - may have thought).  Indeed, capitalism has been as often on the ropes after "the Fall" as it was before.  The transition of the Soviet Union to the free market ended in an oligarchic shambles - while China became a pseudo-Communist (read: fascist) labor powerhouse; the market without the freedom seemed the new dispensation, frankly.  And since then, European nations have gone up to (or over) the edge of bankruptcy with frightening regularity, and 2008 demonstrated that Wall Street was only too happy to destroy the entire Western economy (indeed, they're happy to do it again).  But still, capitalism holds sway in the collective mindset as some sort of economic ideal.  Because, like, you know, the only thing that has "happened" since the Berlin Wall was 9/11 - and anyhow there's this cool new app for your iPhone.

A few trenchant writers have already begun to comment on this strange state of affairs, and have noticed that the progress of social thought, like the culture at large, has slowed to a crawl, while "capitalism" and "the free market" now occupy the sort of uncontested intellectual space once occupied by ideas like "the divine right of kings" and "the Virgin Birth."

But perhaps what is most troubling about our current mental predilections is that capitalism not only reigns supreme in the rarefied realm of pure economics, but has begun to infiltrate the discourse of our artistic culture as well.  More and more, popular art reflects the triumph of market forces.  And indeed, some thinkers have begun to worry that we may not be content merely to imagine ourselves as superheroes on the Web, but have already begun to imagine that we should become "citizens" of a "market society" in real life as well.

In such a society, every existing social norm, and every moral or value, is re-invented as an atomized exchange between free individuals - and so, essentially, all culture can be translated into metaphoric (or even literal) fiscal terms.  What's more, in a market society in its purest form, "freedom"all but requires that there be a price on everything, and that said prices serve as the only arbiters of behavior and lifestyle; indeed to doctrinaire libertarians, the yoke of what has come to be known as "monoculture" should be thrown off: there should be no social contract, no mores, no community judgments - and certainly no official punishments based on what are essentially historic (or aesthetic) criteria.

There's a lot to be said for this idea, of course; today it operates as the unconscious underpinning of much of the popular support for gay rights, as well as opposition to racism.  To my mind, however, such causes are (all too) easily justified by other intellectual traditions - but these very traditions generally require informed intellectual participation, something to which much of millennial society is opposed, and which technological cocooning seems to have rendered obsolete as social capital.  Hence by default the "market society" has become the unspoken foundation of much of our discourse - or what there is of it - even though in the end such a society is no recipe for liberal tolerance, as we naively imagine now.  Luckily for us, an immature, degraded version of Enlightenment ideals still molds the popular arena, like a benign shadow cast by the previous cultural consensus; but there's no reason why that should always be the case (and sooner or later, it won't be; indeed, we've already accepted the idea that corporations have First Amendment rights - and if an "enemy combatant" can be tortured, why can't he be enslaved?).

All of this, of course, would usually be beyond the bailiwick of this blog - only perhaps inevitably, the movement of these larger social wheels has put obvious torque on the mechanisms of a cultural sector I'm often concerned with - the theatre, and particularly the role of the critic therein.  This "torque" has generally taken the form of hostile - well, critique.  Even though everyone agrees that critics are on the way out, everyone it seems would like to get a kick in before the door slams behind them.

Now critics have always been under attack.  Always have been, always will be.  That's the way it is.  If a critic is not under attack, he or she is doing something wrong - or rather, he or she is simply not actually operating as a critic.  What's new about the latest round of assaults on the critical role, however, is that today not only are individual writers, or particular styles or modes of criticism, under censure, but the very idea of criticism is under attack.

Not, of course, in the abstract, for criticism is all but an unconscious mental response to every form of cultural representation; we're all critics, and all the time, too.  Indeed, people are more critical than ever privately.  No, the current conversation, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, revolves around whether there can be a valid public role for the critic.  Can there be a kind of accepted cultural "officer" in place at leading publications, or even in the blogosphere?  Or can we correctly assume that knowledge, sympathy and insight into an art form have no place - and deserve no special respect - in the discourse?

To the opponents of criticism, the answers to those questions are obvious.  For how, these partisans cry, can one opinion be given precedence over another?  After all, isn't everything just "apples and oranges," as the saying goes - and shouldn't everyone be left to their own taste?  Why and how could one opinion be more "valid" than another? The very idea is ridiculous on its face!

As is usually the case with naive arguments, however, this one dissolves under inspection.  Of course all opinions are equal; but we don't turn to a critic for his or her opinion, do we.   No, not really.  Instead we read criticism for its perceptions.  And does anyone really believe that all perceptions are equally valid, or even equally accurate?

Indeed, once we begin to ponder the question of perception, the canard of "All opinions are equally valid" immediately falls apart, or just seems beside the point.  Even the old saw regarding "apples and oranges" collapses - for only with our critical faculties can we tell whether an orange is really an orange, and not an apple painted orange.

So perhaps it's unsurprising that the fury often directed against critics amounts to a deflected, unconscious cognition of this fact.  People shrug off, in general, mere "differences of opinion," after all; but they grow angry when a critic illuminates facets of a work of art that they themselves were unable to perceive - when, in effect, they reveal what they thought was an orange was actually something else.  Or - worse! - that they themselves are something other than they imagine themselves to be.

A.O. Scott - not so far from Anton Ego.

Thus the recent dust-up over Times critic A.O. Scott's diss of The Avengers; to its fans, this blockbuster was simply a "wild ride" featuring all their favorite Marvel superheroes.  But to A.O. Scott, despite some "snappy dialogue," the film seemed "bloated," and "cynical;" indeed, Scott wrote, it was simply "a giant ATM for Marvel."  Which made many people very angry, even though this obviously was not a difference of opinion regarding "wild rides" - A.O. Scott admitted, in fact, that he liked a good thrill ride as much as anyone else; he shared the general opinions of his audience. No, this was entirely a difference of perception.

And unfortunately, part of what Scott perceived was that the people who liked The Avengers were simply easy marks, and almost mechanical in their tastes.  His review assumed, for instance, that even in  the arena of sensation-derived pop pleasure, cultural memory should count for something (he even wanly referenced Rio Bravo), and what's more, that other people had cultural memories, too.  He wasn't interested in getting on exactly the same roller coaster over and over, and didn't really understand why anybody else would be.  In short, he wanted the superhero tradition to develop, but instead felt it was exhausted - precisely because the people who built roller coasters now understood that the popular audience had become so stunted in its response that they didn't have to build in any new thrills.  No real cultural work was required; the "wild ride" could, and should, go faster and faster, but at the same time it could essentially stay in place.

But you see the problem; in a market society, you can't criticize the customers (so Scott had to to go through a ritual humiliation to appease his readership - see previous post), and cultural products can't have cultural histories, anyhow, because there is no more "monoculture" to have a history in (seriously - Rio Bravo??). So the only appropriate way to discuss movies, or plays (or books) is as discrete sets of sensations - like restaurant entrées.  There can be no "tradition," and so criticism can't be a component of a larger, shared conversation - we have tweets now instead!  Or at any rate that's what the new crop of "critics of the critics" have begun telling us, as I'll describe in the second half of this two-part series.

This is just painful

I came across this on Art's site. He found it on the Times site.

And it is so fucking stupid it makes me want to cry.

This sad excuse for a "conversation" seems to have been sparked by Samuel L. Jackson, whose career peaked in intellectual terms with Snakes on a Plane, and who famously dissed Times critic A. O. Scott on Twitter for himself dissing The Avengers, which was last weekend's multiplex fodder.  (Or was it the weekend before?)  Oh and in which Samuel L. Jackson paid some baadassss superhero who kicked asssssss.

Now, artistically - sorry, but I'm laughing already; I actually can't write a sentence that reads, "In artistic terms, The Avengers - " It's just impossible; it's too funny.  The Avengers.  Artistic.  Seriously.  I mean, are the Avengers the ones who are like mutants, which means they're like gay in comic-speak?  Or is one of them the actual new gay one, the Green Lamppost?  I mean gay is so hot in the graphic novel now.  Hot, hot.  Because you know - well, you know; because.  Because Obama.

But back to this sack of shit the Times posted under the rubric "Sweet Spot."  (Uh huh.)  Now I've never been a big fan of A.O. Scott, but he is not stupid, and he is articulate.  (And something tells me that the opinion of the ages will most likely align with his review regarding The Avengers.)  So you'd think he could strike a few intellectual sparks on this subject.  But the Times has teamed him up with David Carr, who thinks the Strokes are as culturally important as the Sistine Chapel.  (I'm not kidding, he actually says that.)  Now true, David Carr looks like he may have been around since, oh, 1512, so maybe he really knows whereof he speaks.  Or maybe Michelangelo is the only other fucking artist this fatuous idiot knows.  (You be the judge!)

But wait, there's more - and actually, here, I think, is the sweet spot of this "Sweet Spot." David is all broken up about how A.O. may have hurt Samuel L.'s feelings.  Because you know what?  David Carr got a bad review once (can you believe it?) - and it hurt!  Carr says this right into the camera, as if he were Charlton Heston laying down the law to Pharaoh - "It HURT!"  So 1-2-3 - awwwwwww.  We're sorry, David Carr.  AWWWWWWW.

Only you know what, David?  Sure, the reviews hurt - but can you say your critics were wrong?  'Cause just judging from this interview, they may have been right (you certainly suck here).

And I'm just curious what case you're actually making.  (Let's review!) Are you arguing that critics should not speak their minds - that is to say, are you a newspaperman arguing for censorship?  Are you seriously arguing that not hurting feelings is more important than free speech - as my kindergarten teacher insisted once, and quite passionately?  (Maybe you would have liked her!)

Or are you arguing that we should all pretend the Strokes are as good as Michelangelo?  Because deep in your heart you know that is an extremely foolish thing for a grown man to believe?

Or were you just paid to say all this crap because the Times saw an opportunity to suck up to the pissed Avengers audience, in the hopes they might suddenly decide to take out web subscriptions?  Oh, yeah.  As if!  Seriously, that's like the most pathetic scenario of all - that you could somehow come off as hip.  It's just - oh, what can I say.  The Times so sucks.

Kael, Bonnie and Clyde

The pint-sized Pauline Kael (at left) put an outsized mark on American film – or rather on American film critics, although many such scribes would like you to believe the difference between those two accomplishments is even tinier than Kael was herself.

Indeed, the debate over that difference has been running off and on now for decades – since only shortly after Ms. Kael’s compelling, colloquial style vaulted her to the New Yorker, from which she long held forth (while securing similar perches for her acolytes in journals across the country). But get ready for a new surge in the urgency of the argument, as we’re passing the 40th anniversary of both Ms. Kael’s most famous review, of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and, of course, the movie it praised – even as the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni remind us of everything that Ms. Kael and the “Paulettes,” as they’re known, left out of their reviews in the last four decades.

A.O. Scott (at right) of the New York Times recently offered his contribution to the dialogue, complete with the usual grandiose claims: Bonnie and Clyde represented not just “a new mode of expression and a new set of values entering the cultural mainstream” but “a battlefield in an epochal struggle” between young and old.  What’s more, “the squares” (as represented by poor old, pompously middlebrow Bosley Crowther, who panned the film) “were routed.” Perhaps more importantly to critics, the film’s success was deemed largely due to an essay by Kael extolling its virtues in the New Yorker. After weak box office returns, Bonnie and Clyde was re-released, and went on to become a hit (though not a blockbuster on the order, of say, The Graduate, which Kael hated).   The obviously unhip Crowther retired from the Times and was replaced by Renata Adler, from the New Yorker – while Kael, who at the time was a freelancer, got half of Adler’s job (for a time, she shared the position with Penelope Gilliatt). And thus was a critical dynasty born.

You can see immediately the problem - both the critic and the criticized are here entwined; subject and object have been conflated; they are as one.  And ever since, a brief against Bonnie and Clyde would be seen as a brief against Pauline Kael (who became further enmeshed in the later efforts of Bonnie's star and writers). A deeper problem, of course, was that Bonnie and Clyde wasn’t all that new or interesting – it was obviously indebted to earlier films, most clearly Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Indeed, its writers had actually shopped Bonnie to Godard and Truffaut as an American "Breathless-with-banjos" (Jean Seberg in Breathless at left; look-alike Faye Dunaway in Bonnie at right).

Thus few have wasted much breath, as it were, on Arthur Penn’s actual movie (which, don’t get me wrong, is still effective, if a bit dated).  They have, instead, lavished praise on its phenomenon, in such careful phrases as Scott’s “a crucial episode in the entwined histories of Hollywood, American film criticism and postmodern popular culture” and Kael’s own “Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about.”

Note that Kael doesn’t claim the movie is original or insightful (it hardly rewards repeat viewings). Instead, Bonnie and Clyde represents the entrance into the commercial world of a certain arthouse stance – that of the genre films of Kael’s youth re-configured as, well, a newly-youthful playground. As Louis Menand once pointed out, Kael was most turned on by an odd blend of nostalgia and invigoration; she adored the pop tropes of her adolescence (the 30s), and likewise worshipped at the altar of the Actor’s Studio (the 50s). When these two rivers ran together, in Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Wild Bunch, The Godfather(s), The Long Goodbye – her praise, as Freud might say, was almost over-determined.


Michael J. Pollard, Faye Dunaway, and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde.

So Kael’s psychology isn’t hard to understand – the kids were all right, and she was one of them.  What’s harder to justify is how these internal needs have continued to be construed as something of a theory (or rather as a naïve pastiche of Susan Sontag’s theories). Of course initially the “youthquake” of the sixties provided justification enough – but alas, the wheels quickly came off Kael’s “trash-is-art” critical cart. Her famous “preview” of Nashville asserted that America would embrace this latest Altman masterpiece (when it wasn’t even finished) – but unlike Bonnie and Clyde, the movie, though it made its money back, didn't catch fire at the box office. She wrote a famously fatuous rave of Last Tango in Paris (yes, I know, it’s a great movie), in which, seemingly discombobulated by the sight of idol Marlon Brando’s nude body, she equated its premiere with that of Le Sacre du Printemps. She continued to flail against Stanley Kubrick, who managed to combine highbrow ambition with pop success, even though her criticism insisted this was impossible (eventually she was reduced to calling Kubrick a pornographer and a racist); she was generally cold toward Hitchcock, yet trumpeted the Hitchcock pastiches of Brian De Palma; and her sneers at David Lean were widely credited with discouraging him from making a film for years after the failure of Ryan’s Daughter. And soon, the public would embrace a new, sexless kind of trash – the Star Wars movies – which Kael’s ideas seemed powerless to stop.

Surely her early nemesis, Bosley Crowther, never wreaked quite so much artistic havoc – even though Kael and Crowther were not as unlike as many supposed. Like Crowther, Kael had it in for movies she thought too pessimistic (Chinatown) or cold (A Clockwork Orange), and she didn’t like movie violence when it satisfied an audience in the “wrong” way (as in Dirty Harry, at left, or Death Wish). Orgiastic violence promulgated by glamorous young people (Bonnie and Clyde, Mean Streets) – in short, violence as sex - was good; but violence by older white guys (Dirty Harry, The French Connection) – i.e., plain old angry violence - was bad. Got it? Fewer and fewer people did, and in the 80s, many began to back away from Kael – perhaps because even as her aesthetic seemed triumphant, American cinema seemed to have suddenly hit a wall. So why did she remain so “influential” for so long?

Part of any answer, of course, lies in her prose, which even today is hilariously sharp. Kael had a genius for actor description (I’ll never forget that she described Debra Winger’s upper lip as “almost prehensile”), and her poison pills of encapsulated invective against moral uplift were always brilliantly funny.  Her rhythms were likewise perfection (every insult seems inexorable); many of her pieces deserve to be classics, at least of rhetoric. More importantly, many people figured out that her gnomic, highly personal style was even better suited to rock albums than movies, and her signature self-centeredness was adopted by pop music critics – the ensuing "Rolling Kael" hybrid still dominates American press writing. (This, in fact, is probably her greatest legacy, God help us.)

Under the saucy style, however, you could often feel Kael twisting inconsistently from one contrarian position to the next, even within a single review; she was against this, and then against that, without realizing she’d contradicted herself (her simultaneous disparagement of Hitchcock and praise of De Palma was only one of many obvious examples). Some of this was due to her transparent obsession with either creating or bucking "trends," but that hardly counts as an excuse. One must admit that Renata Adler’s brutal putdown of her work – that it was "piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless” – is true, in its way, when it comes to any sustained salience: Kael’s oeuvre reveals no critical development, and makes no real sense (this is spun as her “unpredictability”); she herself admitted that her contribution to criticism lay in “style, not substance.”


Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs.

But in this gap lies the shadow that dogs her legend: in the end, she may have done the medium she loved more harm than good. And that’s a hard shadow to shake: she herself once mused that "When we championed trash culture, we didn’t know what it was going to become." Perhaps she didn’t – but shouldn’t she have? Isn’t that part of what a critic is supposed to do – anticipate the effect of praise? Kael may have tried to put the brakes on the white-vigilante violence of Dirty Harry, but what would she have made of, say, Reservoir Dogs (above), in which wild stylization barely conceals the childlike sadism of director Quentin Tarantino, or the even more baroque murders of his Natural Born Killers, an obvious update of Bonnie and Clyde? Would she warm to the torture porn of Eli Roth –would she applaud when Tarantino’s testicles melt off in Grindhouse? I have to say I think she would – while still insisting that A Clockwork Orange was “sucking up to the thugs in the audience”! (Her last directive, in fact, was against her old nemesis – word came from her that Eyes Wide Shut was “a piece of shit,” and the Paulettes fell into lockstep; Salon alone published not one but multiple pans. Needless to say, Kubrick's reputation survived.)

In the end, perhaps most damagingly, patronization was built into Kael’s mindset – she adored the sex and violence of the young from a kind of bohemian matriarchal perspective; she reveled in it the same way a mother coos at her baby. But one has to ask while watching people torn limb from limb in the latest incarnation of Saw: are the kids still all right? Even A.O. Scott – who, despite his expert knowledge of its legend, was only one year old when Bonnie and Clyde was released – now has second thoughts. “I can’t escape the feeling,” he worries, “that just as it has become easier since Bonnie and Clyde to accept violence in movies, and more acceptable to enjoy it, it has become harder to talk seriously about the ethics and politics of that violence . . . I still get a kick out of Bonnie and Clyde, but it’s accompanied by a twinge of unease, by the suspicion that, in some ways that matter and that have become too easy to dismiss, Bosley Crowther was right.” (Egad!) And Scott’s not the only apostate – top Paulette David Denby distanced himself from Kael (almost) as soon as he no longer needed her, and pseudo-Paulettes like Stephanie Zacharek and David Edelstein do amusing pirouettes around their relationship with her (she died in 2001).

But if the Paulettes have all repudiated their maker, where’s her baleful influence to be found, you may ask? Well, perhaps it lies in the fact that it’s too late for her apostles' re-appraisals to have any real power; their twinges of regret about pop-culture violence are utterly undermined by their very embrace of said culture. They can't imagine life outside it, in fact.  Because what Kael accomplished, above all, was a shift in the terms of published intellectual debate from individual artworks to pop culture itself - thus unintentionally shutting out the sources of real cultural ferment. Sure, she bet on low, not high, and had a great early run, but eventually she came up a cropper (this is the part Scott leaves out); high, oddly enough, turned out to be more important than low over the long term, and her heirs simply can’t seem to figure that out. Today, critics like Scott and Ty Burr ponder directors like Tarantino, or Wes Anderson, or even Eli Roth, as if their derivative work was in some kind of line with that of Kieslowski or Haneke; it’s as if Bonnie and Clyde were, indeed, the original, the source, rather than Breathless. It’s not the artwork that counts anymore, but its position in “the entwined histories of Hollywood, American film criticism and postmodern popular culture.” And criticism simply can’t survive like that; indeed, Scott and Burr and the rest have long since succumbed to writing a kind of high-toned, self-aware publicity; they’re not really critics in the time-honored sense of the term - and funny, movies aren’t really movies anymore, either.

Never trust anyone under thirty

Viewer and screen in Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

Perhaps the only thing more depressing than the concurrent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni has been the critical reaction to their passing. Of course by-rote praises were published for their achievements; but there was also a wheedling insistence that they were no longer relevant. In a rambling, unfocused essay in the New York Times, A.O. Scott opined that "the cultural climate that made it possible to hail filmmakers as supreme artists has vanished for good," but he didn't seem to think that was such a bad thing, musing that "The institutions that keep art alive do so at the risk of embalming it." (And I suppose the institutions that embalm art also do so at the risk of keeping it alive!) More tellingly, in an unguarded moment of self-revelation, Scott admitted, "For generations that were not part of the great cinephile vanguard of the ’50s and ’60s, for those of us who grew up in the drab age in between the flourishing of the art houses and the rise of the Criterion Collection, the masterworks of modern cinema had lost their novelty." Ah. So it was novelty that drove Bergman's and Antonioni's reputations - a novelty which inevitably wore off. Even Lionel Trilling, apparently, would concur: "“Time has the effect of seeming to quiet the work of art,” Mr. Trilling observed, “domesticating it and making it into a classic, which is often another way of saying that it is an object of merely habitual regard."

Ugh. Why, oh why, does every middlebrow hack trying to elevate his discourse quote Trilling (at left)?? Perhaps it's because criticism is much, much more likely than art to be 'domesticated' by habitual regard into a cultural commodity. (Still, the poor guy must have spun in his grave so many times by now that he feels like an unassimilated dreidl!)

No doubt Lionel - and Tony - got bored by the classics in the classroom; how could they not? The dimming of their power at the lectern, however, has no connection to their longterm purchase on the soul (as long as it exists, that is). In short, classic status is only a liability to the critic/academic, not to the work itself (as the steady sales of so many classics attest). Of course Tony does hint at this problem, although he can't quite say it aloud: "More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value — that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure — enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is almost unimaginable today. We would rather be teased than troubled, and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness." This is a bit like being sung to sleep by someone who thinks you're already dead, isn't it? But never mind.

In the Boston Globe, (reprinted here) meanwhile, Ty Burr was crooning a similiar tune, if a bit more bluntly: "[After their deaths]The two filmmakers almost seemed relevant again. In truth, they're anything but." At first it's hard to imagine what Burr might mean: they're still relevant to me, for example - but then perhaps the point is that I'm not relevant, because (and I admit it's true) I'm old:

. . . as I put together the Globe obituary . . . one of our department interns — a 20-year-old student who knows her pop history better than most — admitted she had never actually seen any of his movies. After a pause, she confessed she had always confused Ingmar Bergman with Ingrid Bergman, and what did he actually do? The next day was worse: She hadn't heard of Antonioni at all.

Ingrid, Ingmar . . . let's call the whole thing off! And as for Michelangelo Antonispumoni, didn't he paint the Sixteenth Chapel? Gosh, you'd think maybe an arts department intern who'd never heard of either might be fired on the spot, but you'd have thought wrong! Of course not - as Burr assures us, "her only crime is youth" (umm, and ignorance, right?) - and after all, "today's artistic rebel is tomorrow's old fart."


Image as object in Blow-up.

Uh-huh. Never mind about young farts, I suppose. The trouble is, though, that it's hard to see either Bergman or Antonioni as "rebels" - indeed, parsing them in that way already does obeisance to a pop mindset they were generally opposed to (even in Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point, Antonioni deploys his pop soundtrack with a deadpan distance) - and robs them of their true significance. (And needless to say, once you've set up their reputations this way, it's oh so much easier to knock them down.) Essentially, they operated outside the boomer/Woodstock consensus that spawned A.O. Scott and Ty Burr. They had their social concerns, true, and both offered withering critiques of modern life, but what was essential to them was their internality; without a sensitivity to this, their movies can, indeed, seem at times like so much meandering pretentiousness. Of course perhaps that very internality has vanished in the audience - Burr gets closer to saying this outright than Scott does when he ventures that "The ironic detachment that the great post-war directors saw as a symptom of malaise has become the primary way of doing business." Indeed it has, Ty: what Bergman and Antoinioni were warning us we were becoming, our children have indeed become. But saying so might ruffle a few feathers out in Wellesley and Cohasset, mightn't it?

What's perhaps most horrifying about Burr's article is his quick sketch of what "an attuned young moviegoer should attend to": "a new Wes Anderson coming out in the fall and bleeding-edge videos to watch on YouTube, and that Irish rock musical you still haven't seen, not to mention the Korean horror flick — and wait, they've re-edited "Grindhouse" as two separate films for DVD."


Existential questions doggy style in Grindhouse.

Trust me, little intern - you can skip ALL that shit - Grindhouse, The Darjeeling Limited, The Host/D-Games, Once - none of them are really worth your time. In the same 12 hours or so (depending on how much sludge they've packed into Grindhouse 1 & 2), you can see The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Shame, and L'eclisse, Blow-up, and The Passenger. OR, you can check out the later work of Bergman and Antonioni's true heirs - perhaps Blue or Red, or part of The Decalogue by Kieslowski (whose grave is at left - note the hands framing a shot at the top of the headstone); then you could move on to The Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami); Cure (Kyoshi Kurosawa); and Funny Games (Michael Haneke), or even Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón). You may not have a soul now, but even today, with a little time and effort, you can still get one at the movies.